The Essence Flow-Chapter 35: What Lies Beneath

The Essence Flow-Chapter 35: What Lies Beneath

The chamber
thrummed
.
A sound like a dying breath shuddered through the walls. The glyphs on the door flickered, dimmed—
—and with a groan of rusted hinges, it scraped open.
Karn stared at him. “How the
hell
did you—”
“I didn’t need to know who they were,” Elliot said, rising. His shadow stretched long across the rune-scarred floor. “Just what kind of monster thinks in riddles.”
The corridor beyond the door swallowed them whole—
a throat of slick, ribbed stone that pulsed in time with a slow, sick heartbeat.
The air reeked of wet iron… and something older. Something that
gnawed.
Then—a clank.
Metal on stone.
Elliot froze.
Karn’s hand went to his blade.
A voice rasped out of the shadows ahead—ragged, familiar.
“...Hello?”
Towan.
They found him standing next to bars of a side passage, face gaunt beneath the flickering torchlight.
His aura seemed weakened from the corruption, shirt stiff with dried blood.
But his eyes—wide, sharp, disbelieving—locked onto Elliot’s.
“You came?”
Elliot didn’t blink. “Of course I came.” A beat.
“What, you thought I’d let you have all the trauma alone?”
Towan’s laugh came out cracked… but real.
Karn exhaled through his teeth. “Sweet hells, you look like death’s chewed-up napkin.”
“Feel like it too,” Towan muttered, pushing himself upright. His gaze drifted past them, down the throbbing corridor.
“We need to move. They’re close.”
“They?” Elliot asked, voice flat.
“The ones who took me, I guess. That’s what the monk said.”
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He pointed to a wall, exposing a faint sigil burned into it—its pattern twisting subtly like it was alive.
“The monk called them the
Circle of Ourothan
.”
Elliot’s jaw tightened.
He filed the name away like a blade slipping into a sheath.
“Charming,” Karn muttered. “So. Some kind of cult?”
“Looks like it.”
Towan’s smile was all teeth. “And dangerous. They’re experimenting with corruption—trying to stabilize it.”
The corridor bled into a gallery of horrors—
glass and iron chambers
, half-shattered, their jagged edges weeping rust and stagnant fluid. The stench hit them first:
rotting meat and sour Essentia
, thick enough to coat the tongue.
Inside the cells,
things
moved.
Some still bore the shape of men—
if men could be stretched like wax
, their limbs elongated, their ribs pressing against translucent skin. Others were worse:
knotted masses of muscle and bone
, twitching in the dark, their mouths split too wide, their fingers fused into hooked claws. A few pulsed faintly, whispering in voices that weren’t voices—
just echoes of Essentia, gone feral, gnawing at the air
.
Then—
a slam
.
Elliot spun.
One of the subjects had pressed itself against the glass, its
stretched face
smearing black fluid across the pane. No whites in its eyes—just
pupils blown wide, swallowing the light
. Its jaw worked silently, then—
It screamed.
No words. Just sound, raw and ruptured, like a throat torn open from the inside.
Karn took a step back.
For once, he had nothing to say.
Elliot’s gaze cut to the side—
a journal
, its pages brittle and water-stained, splayed open near a collapsed desk. He crouched, skimming the fractured script:
"Day 37. The flesh rejects the binding. Most subjects collapse within hours. Others turn mindless, violent. Useless."
"But a few… adapt."
"The body resists. But the mind—if broken first—accepts."
Towan’s hands clenched. His knuckles
whitened
.
Elliot watched him.
Always watching.
Then, slower, his gaze shifted to Karn.
The big man hadn’t moved. His usual swagger was gone, his face unreadable as he stared at the thing in the glass—the thing that might have been a person, once.
The creature screamed again.
Elliot stood.
"We’re leaving."
Not a suggestion.
Shortly after, they found a vault by accident
The door wasn’t hidden. It
dared
them.
Steel-reinforced, etched with warding glyphs that flickered like dying embers, it loomed at the chamber’s end—
a vault not meant to be found, but to withstand.
Elliot studied the locking mechanism:
a series of rotating discs
, each inscribed with half-faded numerals. Not a cipher. A
timer
.
"Pressure plates,"
he murmured, toeing the faint seams in the floor.
"Step wrong, and the discs reset. Or worse."
Karn cracked his knuckles.
"Or worse?"
"You really want to ask that here?"
Towan muttered.
Elliot ignored them.
Three discs. Three plates.
He stepped—
—left foot on the first plate. The outermost disc
clicked
, rotating to
7
.
—right on the second. The middle disc spun to
3
.
A pause. He exhaled, then shifted his weight onto the third.
The inner disc settled on
9
.
For a heartbeat, nothing.
Then—
a shuddering clank
, and the vault door groaned open.

Chapter 35: What Lies Beneath